James Demmel, Andrew Gearhart, Oded Schwartz and Benjamin Lipshitz

Energy efficiency of computing devices has become a dominant area of research interest in recent years. Most of this work is focused on architectural techniques to improve power and energy efficiency; only a few consider saving energy at the algorithmic level. We prove that a region of perfect strong scaling in energy exists for matrix multiplication (classical and Strassen) and the direct (O(n2)) n-body problem via the use of .5D algorithms: This means that we can increase the number of processors by a constant factor, with the runtime (both computation and communication) decreasing by the same factor, and the total energy used remaining constant.

BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Demmel:EECS-2012-126,
Author = {Demmel, James and Gearhart, Andrew and Schwartz, Oded and Lipshitz, Benjamin},
Title = {Perfect strong scaling using no additional energy},
Institution = {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
Year = {2012},
Month = {May},
URL = {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2012/EECS-2012-126.html},
Number = {UCB/EECS-2012-126},
Abstract = {Energy efficiency of computing devices has become a dominant area of research interest in recent years. Most of this work is focused on architectural techniques to improve power and energy efficiency; only a few consider saving energy at the algorithmic level. We prove that a region of perfect strong scaling in energy exists for matrix multiplication (classical and Strassen) and the direct (O(n2)) n-body problem via the use of .5D algorithms: This means that we can increase the number of processors by a constant factor, with the runtime (both computation and communication) decreasing by the same factor, and the total energy used remaining constant.}
}